


Sorry If You're Starstruck, Blame It On the Stardust

by awkwardCerberus



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, au where Matt is actually in season 3, based off a tumblr post, i dont know which one tho, more unnecessary introspection, sophias back with the shatt reunions, this took like sooo ooo fukken long like end My Life TM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2018-12-12 15:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11739828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardCerberus/pseuds/awkwardCerberus
Summary: "...After all we've been through, no, we won't stand and saluteSo we just ride, we just cruiseLivin' like there's nothing left to loseIf we die before we wake, who we are is no mistakeThis is just the way we're made..."Or, an AU of 3.05 where, instead of Voltron finding Shiro's SOS, it's the flagship of the Handessian Rebellion.





	1. This is a Hymn for the Hymnless, Kids With No Religion

**Author's Note:**

> GUES WHOS BACK WIth MORE SHATT REUNIONS this bitch. And how could I NOT BE i was so stoked to see matt again and now i gotta wait for fuckon October. Like jfc yall. So, until we get our ACTUAL reunion, this shall have to do. Enjoy, for the fic is cheesy and full of cliche. I literally have not written anything since like May so this might be rocky....yeeeeeeeesh
> 
> Just for the record, I fully support the theory that the long haired new Shiro is 100% a clone and #NotMyShiro, but for the love of god this was too perfect not to write so i overlooked that lil caveat for the sake of Shatt 
> 
> Title and description are from "Hymn" by Kesha

"I am seven days out from Thayserix."

Shiro was never a fan of personal logs, believe it or not there were some things the Galaxy Garrison's golden boy didn't like. Sam and Matt both did them religiously - sitting in front of their cameras for almost an hour a day just talking about what had gone on. Shiro was a bit more old fashioned: he'd write out quick, bulleted lists of the day's events in one of the spiral notebooks he'd brought.

"Oxygen levels are low."

Matt always said it made him look like those hipsters sitting around a coffee shop at midnight, listening to their music and trying to sketch a plant on the sidewalk. This was also the same conversation that segued into the anti-gravity pea shooter fight that had cost them the lives of a few good plastic straws and a bag of Sam's freeze dried peas. Not that anyone else would miss them.

"And fuel is...gone."

The truth was that he found the logs depressing. They reminded him how lonely it was being 3.018 billion miles from home. The extra fifty-some-odd minutes skipping the logs gave him, he spent doing small things to keep him occupied for the time being. Double checking the cockpit was all set, making sure the maintenance gauges were all calibrated, pulling a sleeping Matt away from the lab and putting him to bed for the third time that week.

"This will be my last entry."

So what if he'd waited a year and a half to start finally recording a formal pilot's log. Maybe it could have been under different circumstances, but better late than never. These, like the quick lists in his notebooks, would be brief. There had been nothing to say when he'd started this suicide mission of an escape, and there would be nothing to say when he wasted away from it.

He hadn't died of starvation and dehydration yet, so he was definitely going to suffocate. Hindsight told him he didn't need to burn the thrusters twenty-four-seven since he was just going the one direction, but that mattered as much now as it did when he left. That was all there was to report. Short and sweet, and fitting for his last entry.

There was nothing now. This was the last thing he would do, and like all final things, he would be glad there was nothing more left to do.

* * *

This was some ungodly, karmic way for the universe to get back at her. Letta was sure of it. A full quintant shift watching the communications bay and there had been radio silence all day - only in her last ten minutes did the system decide to pick up on an SOS. The signal was too weak to be an actual ship, which meant that they'd have to tow in whatever kind of pod had sent it, which meant another five vargas she had to wait to get some food and a nap.

Letta groaned and sent a response over the same frequency: " _Stay on course. Will send help_." She stood up from her chair and ran from the room, and apparently she hadn't been the only one who'd seen it. The alarms through the ship began blaring for a level two alert, and the further through the ship she ran, more and more people were coming out of their stations armed.

Two of the other officers met her in the hallway coming down from the bridge, neither of them looking very happy. Sciuo and Dra'a weren't ever happy to begin with, but the way their faces soured now was ominous. Dra'a's hand hovered over the blaster on her hip as she hurried to catch up to Letta, and her second in command stormed behind them with his beast-like fangs barred.

"Did you guys see the SOS? I saw the signal but I can't pick anything up on the radar. What's all the hype for?"

Dra'a shook her head grimly as the three rounded the corner and entered the tractor deck, "the bridge grabbed a visual on it. It's a Galra fighter."

Behind them, it seemed like half the ship was running onto the deck armed for combat. Level two alerts were nothing to bat an eyelash at, but whoever was in the fighter should all have been grateful it wasn't a level three alert. Dra'a must have been in a lenient mood or she would have had them blown up on the spot. She, Sciuo, and Letta walked down onto the hangar floor and stood under the control platform while the rest of the rebel soldiers fanned out along the catwalks along the ceiling, a hundred fingers poising over their blasters' triggers.

It may have been a little too obvious that there hadn't been much action lately.

The bright pink beam shot out from around the plasma shield door and slowly drew in the little grey speck floating off in the distance. The closer the Galra fighter got to the ship, the less and less menacing it looked. It wasn't active, that was a given, and it looked like it had run out of power long before the _Handess Alpha_ stumbled upon it.

Letta swallowed and turned to Dra'a, her pointed ears flattening against her hair, "it's just the one? What if it's someone who escaped? If it is, we should get Lieutenant Holt here, he might know—"

Dra'a held a fist up and cut her off, but she didn;t once take her eyes off the incoming fighter, "this may be a trap. If it is, I want to risk as few lives as possible."

The beam pulled the fighter into the hangar, but without any onboard power, the tiny ship fell straight to the floor with a pathetic bang. Dra'a and Letta drew their blasters and aimed at the cockpit, Sciuo drew his khopesh from the sheath on his back, and above them, at least a dozen heavy canons powered up as the three officers slowly advanced on the fighter.

Sciuo broke off to one side and ran up the fighter's right wing, standing over the hatch to the cockpit in case anyone decided to jump out and make a break for it. Dra'a and Letta stopped several feet from the front of the intruding ship and aimed at the outline of the pilot, "this is Commander Dra'a of the _Handess Alpha_. We have you entirely surrounded and will not hesitate to shoot. Come out with your arms behind your head!"

There was no reply.

Dra'a fired a warning shot at the floor to the right of the cockpit, intentionally aiming her shot so the blast grazed the glass of the hatch, "final warning! Come out now, or we will drag you out ourselves."

Again, there was no response.

Dra'a nodded tersely at Sciuo and returned her aim to that of the pilot. In two slashes of his blade, Sciuo sliced the hinges of the fighter's hatch and kicked at it with the heel of his boot. There was nothing holding the hatch in place any more, and the force of the kick sent it slipping off to one side and cracking on the hangar floor. Whispers floated around the hangar as everyone who had been so ready to shoot now tentatively lowered their weapons.

The pilot was slumped to one side, unresponsive, and wearing a battered old space suit. A battered old space suit that was only ever found in the Revxono T-49 pods used by the Handessian Rebellion, ten of which were in the hangar four floors below them. This was not just some random coincidence.

Again, Dra'a nodded at Sciuo, who leaned down over the pilot and wrestled his helmet off, throwing it off to one side. He pushed the long, matted hair out of the pilot's face and placed a hand gently over his neck, feeling for a pulse. After a moment, Sciuo looked back at Dra'a grimly, "he is weak, but he lives. I believe he is human."

Letta gasped, and so did the rest of the hangar. Humans were rare things in this rebellion, and until now there there had only been one. She returned her blaster to its holster and looked up at Dra'a, already knowing what she was about to say, and preparing to run up to the laboratory once she said it.

Dra'a sighed and lowered her blaster, the rest of the hangar following suit. She motioned for Sciuo to bring the human pilot down from the fighter and turned to Letta, "on second thought...tell Lieutenant Holt to meet us in medical."

* * *

"Mother. Fucking. Shit," the moment the solution had touched the culture in the dish, it killed it. And not in a nice way. Little whirls of green smoke started floating up from the melting puddle inside the Petri dish, but Matt dropped the lid on it once it had started smoking, "well, another one bites the dust."

Matt ran his arm along the counter and swept the ruined dish into the incinerator chute before the mess of his newest trial run could melt through the glass. He leaned his elbows against the table and dropped his head to rake his hands through his hair. His fingers caught in the band of his goggles and he tugged them off to hang them over the eyepiece of a nearby microscope.

"Stupid red syntian nitrate. I swear, one day I'll find some kind of plasma that doesn't make it blow up," he stripped off his gloves and dropped them on the table where his elbows had been, and started for the door, "but this is not that day. I'm gonna get some dinner."

There was a tired chorus of okays, and Matt barely made it three steps before the laboratory doors burst open. Letta rushed in, pointing back down the hallway while she tried to catch her breath and talk at the same time. The ship was big, but it certainly didn't require the running of a marathon to get from the communications room to the labs.

"Matt...Matt, you gotta..." she put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath, grabbing Matt's wrist and tugging him towards the door, "they need you in medical...its an emergency. Didn't you hear the alarms earlier?"

"Oh for the love of..." Matt threw his hands in the air and shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose, and huffed, "I just fixed those fucking breakers! Look, give me twenty minutes to get some food, and then I'll go back and—"

Letta waved her hands in front of his face until he stopped talking and began chewing on her lip. She was always the worst at breaking news to people; that's why she worked in communications, it was all tech and no talk, "no, no, not that! We picked up an escaped Galra prisoner..." she dropped her voice to a whisper, "they're human. Like you."

As quiet as she tried to be, the entire lab still heard. Instead of gasping and murmuring as the others had in the hangar earlier, the room fell dead silent. Even the cycling of machines seemed to drop in volume. The other scientists all turned to stare at Matt, and Letta put a hand on Matt's shoulder to console him. Unexpectedly, however, Matt seemed unfazed. His annoyance from thinking the power went out had completely disappeared, and now he was staring at Letta like she'd told him water was wet.

Her face fell, "I thought you'd be more concerned...you said there were other humans with you when you were captured. It's a man with long hair?" Every second she didn't get a reaction, she pressed harder, "Unshaven with a scar across his nose? His right arm is Galran steel! Surely no one from Earth would have that..."

Matt shrugged nonchalantly and crossed his arms loosely, "I mean...yeah, there were others with me, but no one like that. I can try and talk to them if that what you want, but I have no idea who that is. Is it bad that now I feel less special knowing that the Galra had other hum— _ow_! Letta!"

She didn't have time for this, neither did she have the patience. She punched Matt in the shoulder and tugged down on his collar, swore in a language that Matt only knew the profanities of, and growled at him, "Matt! This is serious!"

"Okay, okay...jeez...I'll talk to the guy."

Matt pulled his collar out of Letta's hand and tried to smooth out the wrinkles from her fist as he followed her through the halls of the _Alpha_. The closer and closer they got to the infirmary, however, he was beginning to second guess his nonchalance earlier. Everyone else was practically flooding out into the halls to watch him walk by them, and he half expected a nun with a bell to start following behind him chanting "shame...shame...shame..."

But what else was he supposed to do? He couldn't have just started yelling "stranger danger" and gone on with his lunch break. Matt didn't know very many long haired, unshaven men back on Earth, and the only humans he'd known in captivity was his father and Shiro. When he and turned down the hallway that led into the infirmary, he felt the solemnity of the air begin to thicken. Coming down to the medical ward was never a joyous occasion even on a good day; nothing worth celebrating ever happened in there.

Sciuo was waiting patiently by the door that led into the cryo room, his back straight and his four arms clasped together pristinely behind his back. He seemed to straighten more when Matt got closer, but turned his attention to Letta and looked at her over Matt's shoulder, "thank you, Letta. You are relieved."

She nodded curtly, offering Matt a tight smile and another hand on his shoulder before turning and walking back out into the hall. Matt looked at Sciuo like he was waiting for the older officer to suddenly announce this was all a joke and that everyone one needed to get back to work, "sooo, Major ol' buddy, ol' pal...Letta says you have someone in there who wants to see me?"

"We do not know if he actually wants that. He was unconscious and half dead when we brought him in," as usual, his tone left no room for argument, or anything really, other than the matter at hand, "but, as you are both the only humans that we know the Galra have held in captivity - "

Matt crossed his arms and pretended to be offended, but in actuality, he was growing more and more anxious by the second. He scoffed, but there was no real sarcasm behind it, "because we're human we all know each other? If Dra'a wants me to see this dude I will, but no guarantees."

Sciuo nodded and pressed his palm to the pad by the door, "that is all we ask."

The cryo room in the _Alpha_ 's infirmary felt like a liminal space, one of many like that on the Rebellion's three main flagships. It was nothing glorious. There were eight cryo-replenishers (seven, if you only counted the ones that worked), each one of some random model and age, and some definitely worked better than others. Since there were only those few, they were reserved for the actively dying, and of those, they were filtered a second time based on how fast things would go to shit if they died. So needless to say, Matt was a little surprised that a chance escapee they'd picked up was given one.

He could hear voices on the other side of the door before it opened. One of them was unmistakably Dra'a, and the other was most likely one of the nurses on duty. When the controls for the door beeped after Sciuo opened them, the voices stopped, and by the time the door was open, the room was silent. Matt walked into a room filled with bided worry, everyone looked at him as though he were about to implode catatonically. It wasn't helping his building anxiety.

Matt laughed dryly - thought it was really more of an awkward breath coming out of his throat - and tried to prepare himself for the worst news he could possibly think of, "Commander, no offense to the Kryskarian race or anything...but your beefy build is kinda blocking who I'm supposed to be seeing..."

Dra'a and another nurse stepped to the sides, unblocking the window of the pod and giving the room a faint blue hue. Suddenly Matt felt very small and very much like he didn't belong. All the preparing he had tried to do in the last ten seconds slipped out of his mind faster than he could have imagined possible.

The Galra's prison uniform was what stood out the most to him, but if he was going to have another internal panic attack over seeing one again, it had been stalled. That wasn't important, the ungodly metal arm wasn't important, the four other people in the room weren't important. Nothing was important once he recognized those eyes. They didn't even have to be open for him to recognize them. He'd fallen asleep next to them and woken up next to them hundreds of times. He recognized the jawline from every time his lips or the pads of his thumbs had brushed over it, he recognized those lips from feeling them against his skin. Matt saw those hands, and even though one of them was metal, he could still feel the warmth of them pulling him closer.

The hair, the scar, the metal arm, none of that changed the face before him at all. Matt didn't know how close he'd actually come to the pod until the toe of his boot bumped against the bottom of it. He pressed his palm to the icy surface of the pod and he would have reached through it if he could. When he closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the glass, he could see this same face but younger, much younger, and smiling.

Smiling as he slipped Matt notes in their morning briefings about getting lunch together, or what movie to watch on Saturday night. Smiling as he looked over at Matt and squeezed his hand as they told mission control they were ready for launch. Smiling as they went out onto the surface of Kerberos for the first time and dubbed themselves the first humans to have a snowball fight on another planet ("Not a planet. A _moon_ ," his father corrected). Smiling as he let himself get dragged away into the gladiatorial area instead of Matt.

Even now, it still felt like the same face.

Dra'a bowed her head towards Matt and turned to Sciuo and the medical staff in the room, "let him have some time."

There was an agreement punctuated in silent nods and saddened looks towards the two men as everyone filtered out one by one. The door slid shut with a labored hiss, and then there was only the silence and the familiar, muted noises of slightly overworked machinery. Matt remained unmoved from his place against the glass, and he almost wished the room was still full of people. He would choose a dozen hardened eyes watching him silently implode over the lonely emptiness of outwardly suffering any day.

He wanted to cry but he could not, for all the life in him, find the strength too. If he did not have the strength to even show weakness, maybe he should finally consider himself lucky that Shiro went into that arena instead of him. Matt tried to breath, but he lacked the strength even to do that. Shiro had given him strength; it was ironic that Matt had carried that with him for as long as they had been apart, but the moment they were together again, Matt was no longer strong at all.

"Oh, Takashi...what have they done to you..."


	2. Talking Shit and We’ll Just Smile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so so yall hate me now right because this is so late? I really tried to get this out fast, but ive been so so swamped at work I literally have had no time to even open the file. But on the plus side, I might turn this into a series so i guess thats a positive

This was absolutely impossible. Try as he might, there was no way around it. He was hours away from the most important thing in his entire, short life, and yet this one little speed bump was about to wreck everything. Whatever fresh hell had decided to swallow him up really needed to come back tomorrow because there was no way in this life or any other that he'd let this molehill become a mountain.

Matt groaned into his pillow and rolled onto his back, glaring up at the ceiling and wondering how weird it would be for him to flip off the darkness. He had to get up in four hours and get shot off into space, he should be dead-ass asleep. He rolled his eyes and looked at the clock on the nightstand - 01:04...okay so he had to get up in three hours.

"Hey. Takashi. Hey," Matt flung an arm across the bed and smacked the large lump on the other end of the bed. The lump groaned and a little tuft of ruffled black hair poked out of the blankets, "are you still asleep?"

"...'s'it four yet?"

"No. I just can't sleep. Wanna stay up and talk?"

Shiro rolled back onto his side with his back to Matt, adjusting the edge of the comforter so it covered his head once more, "when it's four, yeah."

Matt huffed and sat up in bed, irritably grabbing Shiro's shoulder and forcing him to roll over. Shiro pushed the covers away from his face with a none-too-happy expression. He tried to pull his shoulder back, but Matt kept it pressed to the bed. They rolled back and forth for a good couple minutes - Shiro trying to roll back over and go to sleep, but Matt always forced him back down.

"Matt," he whined, but it was at least three percent actual irritation, "come on. How do you expect me to pilot us tomorrow if I'm falling asleep?"

Matt took his hand off his boyfriend's shoulder and looked down at his lap, wringing the sheets in his hands anxiously, suddenly very quiet, "well...that's kinda the thing..."

Any animosity Shiro had over being woken up, he'd forgotten. He sat up in bed and pushed his hair back from his eyes, scooting over and closing the few inches of space between them. He wrapped his arms loosely around Matt's middle and pulled his face against his chest, kissing the top of his head.

"I don't think you have to worry about us crashing. Now, if _you_ were the one piloting, then we'd really be screwed."

At least that one had gotten a laugh out of Matt. It was an anxious little exhale of a laugh, but it was a laugh regardless. As soon as it had happened though, he was back to worrying, turning his cheek into Shiro's bare shoulder and shrugging, "it's not that. I just realized we're gonna be gone for eight months. That's a fuck long time. Like, a baby is gonna get conceived and might get born before we get back."

"If you're trying to start ranting about the dichotomy of life and death in the middle of the night, I'll go back to bed," that time, Shiro didn't get a laugh. He softened and started running a finger up and down Matt's arm gently, "you're scared. I get it. This is a big thing. I'm not telling you not to be nervous, but if you keep psyching yourself out, you're gonna hate the entire trip."

Matt pushed himself back enough so that he could look Shiro in the face. He appreciated the pep talk, he truly did, but it wasn't exactly helping. His anxiety was starting to show on his face in his furrowed brow and the chewing of the corner of his bottom lip, "I'm not scared about something bad happening. I _know_ you can fly, and I _know_ my dad and I are gonna find some cool ice shit, but that's not it."

"Then what is?"

"What if we come back and everything's different? Katie's gonna be a sophomore. Dad and Mom are gonna have to celebrate their twenty-third anniversary over government mandated Skype. Bae Bae's gonna have her puppies by then! See? Dichotomy of life and death - "

"Matt, sweetheart, you're rambling. And it's not helping you. Look at me," Shiro put his hands on Matt's cheeks and held his head in place. He smiled softly, "you're probably going to be homesick for a while, and it will suck but it's okay. But you're one of the smartest people in the entire Garrison, and they wouldn't send you up there if they didn't know for a fact that you're going to be amazing. _I_ know you're going to be amazing."

He kissed the small space between Matt's eyebrows and released his cheeks, but he made sure to give him an extra couple seconds of hug before finally retracting himself back under the blankets. Shiro left one hand out, however, because he knew that in about five seconds, Matt would curl under the blankets behind him and hold it.

Shiro was very rarely wrong. The bed dipped behind him, the blankets rustled, and sure enough, Matt pulled his hand against his chest. The kiss on the knuckles was an unexpected variable, but it was welcome. Shiro gave Matt's hand a small shake, and Matt gave his hand a shake back, and it wasn't long after that that they both fell asleep again.

* * *

It was a shame that was just a dream.

Matt woke up with a horrible crick in his neck, one foot asleep, and kind of cold. He groaned quietly and sat up in his chair, digging at his eyes with the heel of his hands, and then blinking them into focus. He'd spent yet another night curled into a chair that had to be impossible for anything but a mouse to be comfortable in, and he'd been an idiot and placed it right under the air vent. And he called himself a scientist.

He looked at the time on his wrist pad, sighing and making himself stand up and stretch. It was still early in the morning, and judging by how fast things had been progressing, he was willing to bet that he had time to get something to eat and come back. By "things", he meant Shiro waking up any time soon, and he very sarcastically meant "fast" as in absolutely nothing had happened in two days.

The pod the doctors had put him in declared him replenished and physically healthy enough to come out, but when they'd opened it up, he fell face first into Head Nurse Briksi's arms with all the grace of a bag of rocks. At that point, Matt was beginning to silently shut down, but Dra'a had told him, with a firm hand on his shoulder and a very hard smile, that he just had to rest. Matt didn't doubt her - it was definitely true - but he was still mad that it meant another small eternity that he had to wonder if things would be okay.

It was weird seeing Shiro like that - dead asleep and curled up in a tiny ball on a hospital cot, his now unruly hair pulled back from his face in Matt's sloppy attempt at a ponytail, and constant pain knitting together his expression. He looked tiny. Like a direwolf that someone had beaten into acting like a puppy. It was unnerving to see.

He looked down at Shiro again, expecting that maybe something had happened in the last two minutes while he'd been musing to himself, but no. How busy was he today? He flicked on his wrist comm and pulled up the little holographic screen, feeling truly blessed that the only reminders he had were the little pointless ones he'd made for himself. The only real rebellion-related one was to work on his red syntian nitrate-proof laser, but even that was more of a personal project.

He was a micro-astrobiologist dammit, not a chemist. He groaned at his own joke. Matt needed new humor.

He looked back and forth between the time and his list, wondering if there was anything on there he could get out of doing. Matt flopped back into the chair and propped his feet on the edge of the end of the bed, scrolling through things like "do laundry" and "get taser staff looked at". He knew he had done maybe three of them? Either way, he started to mumble under his breath to keep him on focus - he wasn't particularly musical, but it was an old song he'd gotten stuck in his head forever ago.

"I been east, I been west...been all around the world...but I never seen a girl like you...dun dun dun da da...I've seen blondes, and brun—"

"...Matt...?"

Matt almost shrieked. And, in hindsight, maybe leaning back precariously in his chair was not the smartest position to be in. He had to windmill his arms to keep from falling ass over teakettle, but once all four chair legs were on the floor, his heart was still lodged in his throat.

He immediately turned towards the door but it was still closed, and there was no one standing in the window. Considering this was one of the more private (though not by much) rooms, and since he hadn't called his own name, that really only left one reasonable option. Matt stood up from his chair slowly and looked down at the only other person in the room with a knot in his throat and tears welling up around his eyelashes.

Shiro was looking up at him through the bits of white bangs that had been too short to stay tied back with the rest of his hair. The overall deadness in his eyes - the hollow shadows under them, the half-conscious, half-lidded thousand yard stare - made Matt's stomach turn guiltily. The fact that he could even still see those eyes in the first place made him feel just as guilty for being happy about it.

Matt put a knee on the edge of the bed and took Shiro's cheeks in his hands, leaning down over him until their foreheads touched and he was close enough to kiss. God, what a thought. If Matt had been told a year ago that he would be able to kiss these lips again, he wouldn't have believed if for all the extra rations in the cell block. That didn't stop him from still doing it though.

"Takashi...holy shit, Takashi..." he whispered between greedily pressing their lips together.

He couldn't stop himself now that he'd started. This went for both crying and kissing. The first tear fell with the first kiss, and now Matt's cheeks were soaked and he had lost track of how many times he kept leaning back in. Somewhere in all this, Shiro reciprocated, and placed his metal hand to Matt's cheek, and immediately Matt put his hand over it and squeezed, too absorbed in this one moment to worry about how foreign it felt.

This was in no way the reunion he'd imagined. This was not the romantic running into each other's arm on a beach and having their perfect moment, it wasn't flower petals falling in the breeze as they walk home hand in hand, nor did it have the smiling faces of their family and friends. It was just the two of them, alone in the recovery room with the weird blue stain on the floor and the flickering light bulb. But it couldn't be better any other way.

Shiro pushed back gently on Matt's cheek and put a couple inches between their faces, feeling the warmth left behind on his lips start to recede, "I - you...how did you escape from the Galra?"

Matt sat back on the bed, pulling Shiro's hand with him and turning it over and over in his hands, committing each little detail of the prosthetic to memory, "it wasn't anything fancy. There were some rebel ships in the area that just so happened to be breaking into my prison. Once they freed me, they just couldn't get enough of that Matthew Holt charm."

"And...and the rebels found me too?" Something in Shiro's eyes seemed to dull. He was grateful, but at the same time he was ungrateful that he'd been found, "I was supposed to be getting back to - "

"To Voltron? I know. We went through your pilot logs."

Matt looked down at the bed suddenly, still forcing himself to maintain at meats a modicum of his smile for Shiro. This was hard enough as it is, he wasn't keen on recalling how his heart broke when the first words he'd heard Shiro say in almost two years were about how he was probably going to die alone in space. A bit of hair fell in front of his eyes, and he pushed it behind his ear as he looked back up, focusing on chapped lips rather than dulled eyes.

"But, don't let Commander Dra'a hear you say that. She kinda hates Voltron. She says that - " he dropped his voice in an attempt at a comical impersonation of her, "'running a rebellion is hard enough without five overambitious children in flying cats'. You should have seen her after that shit with killing Zarkon. She crushed a metal chair with just her tail."

A silence fell between them, not an awkward one, but a silence nonetheless. Neither of them had anything left to say. There was no other sound in the room for some time, aside from the occasional rumble of the air vents or an echo of an announcement over the PA system. Matt had stupidly gotten all his romantic reunion plans out of the way first, like a child gorging themselves on sweets before dinner, and now he had no idea what to do with himself.

Shiro wasn't looking at Matt, he could no longer bring himself to bring his eyes above Matt's shoulders. What did one say in these types of situations? He knew that he should probably thank Matt for not letting him die alone in space, but he really wasn't grateful. He had been so close to finally getting back to Voltron, they were right there. Now they were infinitely further away, and he was no closer to finding them now than he was when he was still with the Galra.

But this was Matt. Matt who Pidge had been searching for months to find, Matt who had been screaming and hurt the last time Shiro has seen him, Matt whose name he still cried out when he woke up screaming. This was Matt who'd saved him from starving and suffocating in the lonely void, and yet Shiro was somehow still resentful towards him. He didn't want to stay here, he needed to find Voltron, he needed to find Keith and Lance and Pidge and -

Pidge. Katie. Oh God. He had to find Pidge and tell them about Matt. They'd be so happy their brother is alive, they must be so worried. There has to be someway he can contact them, there must be some kind of communications equipment on the ship. He had to find them, he had to.

"Takashi, hey" Matt touched Shiro's human wrist, but he hurt a little inside seeing how hard that made him flinch, "you look kinda pale. Do you want me to leave? I can come back later if you'd like."

Shiro shuddered at the touch and gradually moved his eyes up from his lap - first to the chair by the bed, then to Matt’s stomach, his chest, until finally he had enough courage built up to look, in the very least, at Matt’s face. It was hard at first, but the more he focused, the more he saw different. The longer hair, the tiredness in his eyes, a scar on his left cheek. The staff folded up on his back was something that felt decidedly wrong; Matt used to scream when he had to kill a baby spider with a ten pound shoe, him carrying a weapon didn’t seem to fit.

Shiro blinked; he’d been asked a question, “stay. I’d like you to stay. Sorry...I’m sorry, it’s just a little...it’s hard. This is a lot...”

Matt sighed, but even if Shiro didn’t hear it, he didn’t mean to do it so suddenly. He definitely felt that last part. Seventy-two hours ago, his most pressing issues were not blowing himself up in the lab, beating Letta’s high scores on the sparring deck, and trying not to get shot at while he hacked Galra computers. What a small universe.

“But you’re safe now. Take your time with everything, and when you feel up to it, we can move you into my room,” Matt stood up off the bed and carefully put a hand on Shiro’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch this time, and Matt dared to kiss the top of his head, “I have to go find Dra’a and make some reports, but I’ll be back with dinner in a bit.”

He walked towards the door silently, and as cheesy as it felt, Matt couldn’t stop himself from pausing in the doorframe and looking back over his shoulder at Shiro, smiling softly like this wasn’t as fucked up as it all felt, “I’m really glad we found you, Takashi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bae Bae is the real ass name of the [Holt’s dog](http://voltron.wikia.com/wiki/Bae_Bae)
> 
> And the song Matt is singing is "[Can I Get Your Number (A Girl Like You)](https://youtu.be/iMjIEjQfqac)" by No Authority...aka that 2000s boy band Josh Keaton was in
> 
> I posted this right after i finished writing it so theres probably a LOT of errors...

**Author's Note:**

> Will chapter two come out in a timely manner?? WHO THE HELL KNOWS bc I sure don't.
> 
> Unbeta'd so mistakes are mine.


End file.
